Tim Costello - Faith

To Merridie, who has kept faith with me.

To Dr Thorwald Lorenzen, who has helped me understand and apply my faith to the times in which we live.

To the World Vision worldwide community, with whom I have shared faith in action for the last thirteen years.

Contents

E ncounters with Tim Costello are always memorable. Tims voice commands your attention, in volume and meaning. He cries out to us, gets our attention and speaks to our common humanity causing us to pause and consider the world from the perspective of those living on the margins.

Tim brings the plight of the most vulnerable into our homes, our churches, into country towns and into the halls of power and we are convinced to lend a hand, to engage and share our resources.

He invites us into a conversation where we discover a world in need of restoration and we are inspired to act.

His Christian faith is a lived experience. It is his lifeblood, which he describes as having nourished the foundations of his life, making him who he is. As you will discover, his is a deep, broad, inclusive faith that loves and includes first, bringing people from across the spectrum of society together. This is what makes Faith an important message of hope and reconciliation in this time. While not all will agree with Tims perspectives, this book is an invitation into a timely discussion, one that you can be assured he is up for!

Faith is also a window into the breadth of Tims work and relationships with people from all corners of the earth. It shows what has shaped, challenged, inspired and disappointed him, as well as his frustrations with politics and social policy here in Australia and beyond.

He is well known for his public profile as a social justice advocate, a leader in civil life and a church representative. He has worked at the coal face of ministry in Melbourne, local politics in St Kilda and with World Vision Australia.

World Vision has been greatly blessed by Tims fine leadership, which has led to millions of Australians being inspired to act to end poverty and bring relief to the worlds most vulnerable. Tim plays an important leadership role in the sector here in Australia and on the international stage. I want to personally thank Tim for his continued service to the organisation and his unrelenting commitment to see the lives of the most vulnerable transformed.

This is Tims faith story. He does not pretend to speak for the World Vision partnership, which has 45,000 staff internationally, drawn from so many Christian faith traditions and other faiths.

Enjoy your encounter with Tim. Its sure to inspire you to reflect on your values and how you live them out.

Donna Shepherd

Managing director of Creating Communities,

Director of World Vision International, World Vision Australia and World Vision New Zealand

I often feel fed up with faith. So much said in the name of God represents a God I do not believe in or want to have anything to do with. The public religious discourse is narrow, bigoted and judgemental. I cringe when I hear these attitudes from my Christian colleagues who believe they are speaking for God. Often I wonder how much these purported followers of Jesus actually know about him.

I could renounce my faith or try to start a new variant, but that seems unrealistic. I am stuck. Stuck because the truth is that my faith is my lifeblood. It has nourished the very foundations of my life and made me who I am. I have written before on hope; this is my attempt to do justice to faith.

I see that this is true in so many others who are part of this faith, the largest worldwide religious community. Like me, they have been touched, changed and given purpose by their faith. So, though fed up with it, I realise that without the Christian faith and its spirituality of connection to others I cannot live meaningfully. I have Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu friends who share this feeling about their respective faiths. They too feel caught: needing the beauty and meaning of their faith in order to be their best selves but also wanting to shed the violence done in its name. I cannot speak for them, but what follows is my spirituality, which has emerged from my faith story. Carl Jung said the lack of meaning in life is a soul sickness, the full extent and import of which we have not yet begun to comprehend. I wonder what Jung would say about our age if he were alive today. I suspect he might diagnose even more soul sickness. Most of us are much more affluent than the people of Jungs time, but now we see mass epidemics of depression and anxiety disorders, high suicide rates, family breakdown and addiction. Why, when we are affluent, are we not flourishing?

I think soul sickness is the right term to describe what we are facing. Maximising wealth can never change the nature of the beast: we are animals who need meaning and purpose. Equally, maximising happiness as the goal of life is not working for most. To approach life with the question What can I get? rather than What can I give? is to mistake happiness for purpose. This is a chronic mistake that results in many unhappy individuals. Happiness is not the goal, but rather a by-product of a deeper sense of purpose.

We all need something more than just the material in order to find meaning. Spirituality is the exploration of that hunger. At its essence spirituality is about a relationship and connection to something bigger something transcendent. It inevitably involves faith. For me, without a spiritual connection to God I struggle to find a deeper connection to who I am, to my neighbour, to the stranger, and to the world around me.

To speak of spirituality can seem irrational when the norm is the secular. We mean at least three things when we speak of the secular: firstly, the falling away of religious practice and belief. Secondly, the emptying out of religion and faith from public spaces. Thirdly, the move from a situation where everyone believed in God or some higher being to one in which belief in God is understood to be one option among others (and is now the least plausible); it is no longer the default setting. This is a profound change in our democratic society, but I think we still have beliefs and even a spirituality that is hardly secular and yet shapes our behaviour, policies and votes.

I resent both religious fundamentalists and secular fundamentalists. Both come to the table with their minds made up. Both are willing to exclude the other from the conversation if they do not surrender their position. As Rumi said, Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I will meet you out there. My faith says God is inviting us to that field, no matter how sure we are that we know the truth. It takes a certain faith to walk out to that field.

In my study theres a whimsical picture of me at eighteen. I look into those eyes and wonder at how my faith has changed. I see someone then who was more focused on the internal than the external; someone who wanted not only to do good, but to be good. There was a clarity that I had to surrender to something outside myself to gain strength within myself.

I have tried to keep a journal as part of my spiritual disciplines since I was seventeen. When I look at my entries for November 1975 I am shocked to discover that for the day after Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlams dismissal a momentous national political event there is nothing recorded about it. My focus was on an inner struggle around my envy of someone else and diarising my failure. And I come from a family interested in politics!